Plants for cat

wanderer 22

Hi all,

Apologies in advance for my complete lack of gardening knowledge..

In our old house we had the below bush/tree (?) Our cat loved to hide underneath it..can anyone recommend a similar one that can be bought ready grown and that we can just stick (technical term!) In our garden?

Thanks!

looksee

That is a very old tree, you are not likely to get anything similar - if you did it would be spectacularly expensive and require all sorts of complicated planting, with no guarantee it would survive.

As someone who has always had one or more cats, you know how contrary they can be, anything you specifically provide they are likely to ignore, but like a child will play with the box (ie, whatever is there) instead of the gift.

I am sure others will come up with ideas but I would suggest a fast growing shrub to create a hidey-hole - or do what we did and buy a small kennel for outdoor shelter. You could plant a climber to grow over it and it would make a shelter fairly quickly. Fast growing shrubs with shelter potential might include leycesteria - pheasant berry - will make a little thicket fairly quickly. Buddeleia also grows fast and tends to arch down. If you have a suitable wall or fence you could grown a clematis montana on it which will also turn into a bit of a thicket over a few years.

The effect that you want to go for might be achieved with a standard cotoneaster (a cotoneaster grown as a standard, ie on a stem) which will tend to grow down into a kind of weeping cave, if you get a fairly mature one it should not take too long and they are very hardy. I trained an ordinary cotoneaster into one of these, just to see if I could, and it worked remarkably well. You would be better to buy one ready trained though.

https://www.trees-online.co.uk/Bareroot-cotoneaster-hybridus-pendulus.html something like this.

wanderer 22

Thanks so much for that, great information! And yes , you are of course right, the cat will ignore anything we provide her with!!

joujoujou

Weeping willow. Not really the same plant you had, but similar shape. I have a few and cats love to sit underneath and even more love to jump onto the branches to watch birds flying around (my cats are too lazy to catch them).